Search results

One of the biggest concerns of modern information retrieval systems is reducing the user effort required for manual traversal and filtering of long matching document lists. Thus, the first goal of this research is to propose an improved scheme for representation of search results. Further, it aims to explore the impact of various user information needs on the searching process with the aim of finding a unified searching approach well suited for different query types and retrieval tasks.

The BoW online bibliographical catalogue is based on a hierarchical concept index to which entries are linked. The key idea is that searching in the hierarchical catalogue should take advantage of the catalogue structure and return matching topics from the hierarchy, rather than just a long list of entries. Likewise, when new entries are inserted, a search for relevant topics to which they should be linked is required. Therefore, a similar hierarchical scheme for query‐topic matching can be applied for both tasks.

The experiments show that different query types used for the above tasks are best treated by different topic ranking functions. To further examine this phenomenon a user study was conducted, where various statistical weighting factors were incorporated and their impact on the performance for different query types was measured. Finally, it is found that the mixed strategy that applies the most suitable ranking function to each query type yielded a significant increase in precision relative to the baseline and to employing any examined strategy in isolation on the entire set of user queries.

The main contributions of this paper are: the alternative approach for compact and concise representation of search results, which were implemented in the BoW online bibliographical catalogue; and the unified or mixed strategy for search and result representation applying the most suitable ranking function to each query type, which produced superior results compared to different single‐strategy‐based approaches.

The increasing availability of digital libraries with cross‐citation data on the Internet enables new studies in bibliometrics. The paper focuses on the list of 10,000 top‐cited authors in computer science available as part of CiteSeer. Using data from several consecutive lists a model of how authors accrue citations with time is constructed. By comparing the rate at which individual authors accrue citations with the average rate, predictions are made of how their ranking in the list will change in the future.

The paper aims to explore, using an analysis of the three components of memes content, form and stance – whether and how the memes offer a broad picture of a specific society during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.

The author collected, from the two largest Facebook groups in Israel, 25 memes with the largest number of likes in each month, beginning from the month in which awareness of COVID-19 increased significantly, between March 2020 and February 2019. A total of 597 memes were collected. The data were analyzed by a quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Findings indicate that meme culture effectively reflects a society’s situation and the challenges it faces. Memes also reflect local cultural icons and effects. Meme contents vary across groups. During a crisis, memes do not function as fertile groups for sharp criticism or calls to take action to resolve society’s social ills.

Memes may serve as a tool to understand and explore an unfamiliar, foreign culture, its state of mind and its history through meme culture.

Memes may constitute a platform for relieving stress through light-hearted humor, unaccompanied by a true call to action; that is, “slacktivism” which gives a sense of active participation without involvement in actual activities for change.

The study reveals that the Israeli meme culture is not activist and rather focuses on humor to relieve stress. Memes may be used as “bread and circuses” or a means of “slacktivism” that fails to call to genuine activism.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-07-2022-0381